1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and system for a specific business application of database processing.
2. Description of Related Art
As businesses become more productive and profit margins seem to be reduced, relationships between businesses and its customers become more valuable. Businesses are more willing to protect those relationships by spending more money on information technology. Because an enterprise may collect significant amounts of data concerning their operations and the flow of goods to and from the enterprise, some of the expenditures on information technology are used to xe2x80x9cminexe2x80x9d these collections of data to discover customer relationships that are useful to the enterprise.
Data mining allows a user to search large databases and to discover hidden patterns in that data. Data mining is thus the efficient discovery of valuable, non-obvious information from a large collection of data and centers on the automated discovery of new facts and underlying relationships in the data. The term xe2x80x9cdata miningxe2x80x9d comes from the idea that the raw material is the business data, and the data mining algorithm is the excavator, shifting through the vast quantities of raw data looking for the valuable nuggets of business information.
Certain businesses desire a better understanding of customers and purchased products, and data mining has been used in an attempt to discover relationships between customers and purchases. One class of relationships for which some businesses desire guidance is the relationship between failure of transportation products, such as cars, trucks, minivans, etc., and the appearance of warranty claims for the products. Business may own several databases from which such relationships could be extracted if the proper methodologies could be applied. However, data mining analysis heretofore has been concerned primarily with relationships between customer characteristics and product characteristics. However, one of the aspects of the customer-retailer relationship that is not assessed by data mining is the geographic relationship between the customer and the retailer. Spatial analysis using a Geographic Information System (GIS) is used to delineate those geographic relationships. For example, much of a relationship between a customer and retail relationship or a manufacturer and its retail distribution points can be related to the way that customer product complaints are handled. The spatial relationships between the locations of product failures and the location of their repairs cannot be assessed without the use of GIS. Therefore, if there were geographic factors that bear upon the reason for the failure, they would not be considered.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a method and system for data analysis that discovers relationships between the cause for transportation product failures and the locations of other entities or events which may contribute to the cause of the product failures. These may include data such as the retail outlets at which the transportation products were purchased, the manner in which the transportation products were shipped to the retail outlets as well as the manner in which the transportation product is used and the location of the area of its primary use in comparison to the repair facility that undertakes repairs of the damaged product when it is under warranty. Much of the respective geographic relationships between these data can contribute to the validity of warranty claims that are filed against the manufacturer""s warranty by the retailer who repairs the transportation product. The validity or non-validity of these claims effect the well being of the relationship between the retailer who sold and/or who repaired the damaged transportation product as well as the continued good relationship between the manufacturer, the retailer, and their ultimate transportation product customer.
A method and system for ascertaining warranty issues associated with transportation products is provided. Transportation products are manufactured at a factory, and as the products are made, historical information concerning significant events related to the manufacturing process may be stored. As the transportation product is delivered to a retail outlet, other significant event information may be stored. Locations for the repair of the products under warranty may be related to the servicing of selected transportation products as well as their use. Product history information for the selected transportation products may be retrieved from one or more databases. Data mining algorithms may be employed to generate input data into a GIS for an analysis that will allow the formulation of a set of spatial relationships.
In this process, the locations of products within a region are associated with the product history information to form a set of spatial relationships between events that have led up to the repair of the product as well as the location of that repair with respect to the original retailer selling the product. Product history information may include such information as purchaser address information, information related to manufacture of the selected transportation products, information related to transportation of the selected transportation products from a manufacturing site to a retail outlet, primary use of the transportation product, etc. To understand the validity of a warranty claim filed against the manufacturer warranty by the repairer of a damaged transportation product, one must not only consider the attributes related to the cause for the damage but the spatial relationships between those attributes.